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When it comes to the holidays, it always seems like a thousand different things have to happen before we get to those few (hopefully more) moments of enjoyment. Whether you're shopping for gifts, running through the airport, entertaining guests, or cooking up a feast, hours of preparation are involved. In the midst of all that, there are plenty of times when you'll vent your frustrations with a phone call, text, tweet, or status update. But what if the solution to your holiday woes was already in your hand? Avoid some of those headaches this holiday season by downloading these apps and phoning in the holidays.

SHOPPING

You can get all Charlie Brown about it but that won't change the fact that gift-buying is one of the primary activities of the holiday season.

Making a List: To keep track of who's getting what, there's No More Socks, which brings together your bookmarked pages, photos, and notes with your contacts. You can even set a budget for your shopping spree. And to guard against prying eyes, the app can be password-protected. Gift List Manager has many of the same features and a barcode scanner to boot. If you can't even get to the list stage because you're low on ideas, Gift Ideas taps Amazon to let you shop according to the occasion, age, personality, and your relationship to the gift recipient.

Home Shopping Networked: The parking, the trek, the crowds, the Muzak, the lines, the schlepping, the locating the car—there are plenty of reasons to dodge the malls. If you opt for a hot chocolate, sofa, and roaring fire instead, you can still get your gift buying done. Amazon Mobile and Target are great for large swaths of shopping. ShopStyle sounds narrow but culls its selection from over 300 stores and gives you dozens of ways to search for presents for women, men, kids, and the home.

Chandra is senior features writer at PCMag.com. She got her tech journalism start at CMP/United Business Media, beginning at Electronic Buyers' News, then making her way over to TechWeb and VARBusiness.com. Chandra's happy to make a living writing, something she didn't think she could do and why she chose to major in political science at Barnard College. For her tech tweets, it's ChanSteele.
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